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What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche
What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche
What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche
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What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche

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The trajectory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought has long presented a difficulty for the study of his philosophy. How did the young Nietzsche—classicist and ardent advocate of Wagner’s cultural renewal—become the philosopher of Will to Power and the Eternal Return?
 
With this book, Laurence Lampert answers that question. He does so through his trademark technique of close readings of key works in Nietzsche’s journey to philosophy: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Human All Too Human, and “Sanctus Januarius,” the final book of the 1882 Gay Science. Relying partly on how Nietzsche himself characterized his books in his many autobiographical guides to the trajectory of his thought, Lampert sets each in the context of Nietzsche’s writings as a whole, and looks at how they individually treat the question of what a philosopher is. Indispensable to his conclusions are the workbooks in which Nietzsche first recorded his advances, especially the 1881 workbook which shows him gradually gaining insights into the two foundations of his mature thinking. The result is the most complete picture we’ve had yet of the philosopher’s development, one that gives us a Promethean Nietzsche, gaining knowledge even as he was expanding his thought to create new worlds.
 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 26, 2018
ISBN9780226488257
What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche

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    What a Philosopher Is - Laurence Lampert

    What a Philosopher Is

    What a Philosopher Is

    Becoming Nietzsche

    Laurence Lampert

    The University of Chicago Press

    CHICAGO & LONDON

    The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

    The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

    © 2017 by The University of Chicago

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

    Published 2017

    Printed in the United States of America

    26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48811-0 (cloth)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48825-7 (e-book)

    DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226488257.001.0001

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Lampert, Laurence, 1941– author.

    Title: What a philosopher is : becoming Nietzsche / Laurence Lampert.

    Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2017031739| ISBN 9780226488110 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226488257 (e-book)

    Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. | Philosophy.

    Classification: LCC B3317 .L256 2017 | DDC 193—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031739

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    It is certainly not an overstatement to say that no one has ever spoken so greatly and so nobly of what a philosopher is as Nietzsche.

    Leo Strauss

    Contents

    Abbreviations

    Introduction

    PART 1  Young Nietzsche in the Service of Schopenhauer and Wagner

    1  The Birth of Tragedy: Prometheus the Knowing Maker of Culture

    2  Backgrounds of Schopenhauer as Educator

    3  What a Philosopher Is: Schopenhauer as Educator

    4  What an Artist Is: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth

    PART 2  A New Public Nietzsche: Enlightenment Optimist

    5  Backgrounds of Things Human All Too Human

    6  The Philosopher as Free-Minded Enlightenment Optimist

    7  An Enlightenment Optimist’s View of the Future of Morality, Religion, and Art

    8  An Enlightenment Optimist’s View of the Transformation of Culture

    PART 3  Nietzsche Enters His Mature Philosophy

    9  "Sanctus Januarius": The First Work of Nietzsche’s Maturity

    10  The Opening of "Sanctus Januarius"

    11  The Center of "Sanctus Januarius"

    12  Backgrounds to the Center of "Sanctus Januarius"

    13  The Ending of "Sanctus Januarius"

    14  Backgrounds to the Ending of "Sanctus Januarius"

    Conclusion. The Philosophy and Art of Nietzsche’s Maturity

    Works Cited

    Index

    Footnotes

    Abbreviations

    Introduction

    What is a philosopher? That question occupied Nietzsche for his whole thinking life. While his answer grew more sophisticated and rich, also more personal, as his thinking deepened, from the beginning he held the philosopher to be the highest human type. It is important to find out from such people as Heraclitus that they once existed, he said when he was twenty-eight, because one would suppose that a striving for knowledge like Heraclitus’s would be, by its very nature, forever unsatisfied and unsatisfiable were there not a historical record of Heraclitus with his regal self-esteem, his conviction that he is the one favored suitor of truth herself (PTA 8). Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, that is what a philosopher is, a human being driven to know, coming to know, and, with Pythagoras and Empedocles in particular, defining how a whole community should live. As these historic figures showed, a philosopher naturally generated the highest art, the highest making, a way of living that could structure the life of a whole people.

    Nietzsche’s view that it is important to find out from a philosopher that he once existed was shared by Plato who devoted his life to showing that Socrates, his model philosopher, once existed. And Plato arranged his artful dialogues chronologically to allow his attentive reader to see Socrates becoming a philosopher, a thinker on what is, and then, as a consequence, becoming a political philosopher, a thinker on what culture could become in order to support philosophy.¹ Plato showed that it was important to find out that the philosopher Socrates once existed and to find out how he became the philosopher he was.

    Descartes had a similar view: after experimenting with many ways of introducing himself to the world but not publishing any, he chose to introduce himself through autobiography, his Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting the Mind, the tale of how he became a philosopher. He said his tale was a history or if you prefer, a fable, the becoming of a philosopher being in fact a tale fit for fable of the sort Descartes wrote.² Through autobiography the philosopher Descartes showed that he too held that it was important to find out that such a man as he is once existed.

    While Nietzsche held very early that it was important to learn that philosophers existed, it was only late in his own career, just two and a half years from its end, that he himself began to report explicitly on his own existence, to write autobiographically of Mr. Nietzsche. He did so against a powerful inclination to privacy and for one reason only: to show the arc of thinking by which he became a philosopher, that knower of a special kind, the very possibility of which one could doubt, especially in modern times. He would show his reader what it was important for modern readers to learn: that a philosopher was possible in our time and that a philosopher could attempt in our time what the philosophers had always attempted in their times: to change the measure, stamp and weight of things (SE 3).

    Why did Nietzsche begin to publish autobiographical accounts of himself and his work when he did and in the way he did? He turned to explicit, public autobiography only after he had gained the chief tenets of his mature understanding and reported them in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, itself veiled autobiography. His explicitly autobiographical publication first took the limited form of one Foreword to one of his previous books; then, some months later, he decided to write Forewords to each of them. Collectively, his Forewords would show how each book took its place in the arc of his becoming a philosopher. The Forewords of 1886, Nietzsche’s first explicitly autobiographical publications, aimed to show his engaged reader that their author was a philosopher, a forerunner in experiencing what modern human beings would experience, what you were experiencing. He was a solitary high in the mountains, the first to see the new sun rising; by describing it, he advanced its ascent in you and in the culture shared by all moderns. My book aims to set out that Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who recognized that we need to find out that he once existed, he, the philosopher who first came to an understanding of what late modern humanity could become as knowers of the world and as actors in the world.³

    What to Do with Things Human All Too Human?

    Nietzsche’s decision to publish autobiographical accounts of how he became himself came late in his career even though he had been writing private autobiographical sketches since he was a boy. Still, he knew when he was preparing entries for his 1878 book Things Human All Too Human that he had good reason to explain himself to the reader of this book because it marked an otherwise inexplicable break with the perspective of his first five books; so he wrote out autobiographical explanations in his workbooks:

    To readers of my earlier writings I want to state explicitly that I have abandoned the metaphysical-artistic views that in all essentials rule them: those tenets are comfortable but untenable. (KSA 8 23 [159] end of 1876–summer 1877).

    But he published no such notice. Nine years later, his decision to finally explain himself in autobiographical Forewords came about in a series of steps involving that very book, Things Human All Too Human. He had completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra in April 1885, and he knew while completing it that it was dark and hidden and ridiculous to everyone, as he said in a letter to his faithful assistant, Heinrich Köselitz (September 2, 1884)—this book, the book he regarded as by far his most important book, needed an explanation to help make it less dark and ridiculous. So he began writing an "introductory book,"⁶ as he said in a letter to Köselitz on January 24, 1886, after he had worked on that introductory book for more than nine months:

    It is very important for me to do the new edition now: just between us, I think I would not be able to come back to it again later. But the last summer and unfortunately this winter too would have been wasted on reworking this introductory book. I want to have it off my soul. A nightmare!

    He calls the introductory book he wants off his soul a new edition, but it was the book that would appear that summer bearing the title Beyond Good and Evil. For its first nine months, months he now feared he had wasted, he called that book a new edition—of Things Human All Too Human. But what about the book that already bore that title? He had just told Köselitz what he would do with it: destroy it. Nietzsche wanted to buy back from his publisher all 511 remaining copies of the original 1,000 copies of Things Human All Too Human in order to destroy them (zur Vernichtung). Destroying those copies would allow him to publish the book he had just worked on for nine months as Things Human All Too Human, the proper introduction to prepare its reader for the world-changing book that was unavoidably dark and hidden and ridiculous to everyone. So important was Thus Spoke Zarathustra to him that he was prepared to wipe away four years of concentrated, demanding labor on Things Human All Too Human for the sake of a proper introduction to it.

    The nine months during which Nietzsche worked on his new book with the radical intention of destroying Things Human All Too Human came at the end of a two-year fight with his publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, to gain possession of all the remaining unsold copies of all his books, 9,723 in all, according to Schmeitzner’s inventory list,⁷ a huge number that reflected Nietzsche’s belief that Schmeitzner had failed to make his books available to the public. The earliest indication in the surviving correspondence of his intention to destroy Things Human All Too Human appears in a letter to his sister Elisabeth on August 15, 1885, a moment in his long fight with Schmeitzner when it appeared that he would in fact be able to buy back all the remaining copies of all his books.⁸ He gave Elisabeth strict instructions about his intentions for them in four numbered steps, doubly underlining what he wanted first:

    Things Human All Too Human. 1878

    The Appendix to it: Assorted Opinions and Maxims 1879

    The Wanderer and His Shadow 1880.

    these are absolutely in need of a speedy newly edited edition.

    Then he listed his other books, showing no urgency whatever about getting possession of them.⁹ At the beginning of December 1885, Nietzsche wrote a long intimate letter to his dearest friend, Franz Overbeck, speaking first about the difficulties he had faced over the past seven years and turning eventually to his problems with Schmeitzner, Overbeck’s publisher as well, and his hopes for a possible new publisher, Hermann Credner: "I came to full agreement with Credner about a second edition of Things Human All Too Human, for which I’ve already done everything (except write the fair copy)—a whole summer’s work is invested in that!" With Overbeck too he spoke of destruction: "Schmeitzner raised an impediment by demanding the sum of 2500 Marks for the destruction of the remaining copies of the first edition. And with that, as I saw, case closed is laid forever to the possibility of a second edition."¹⁰

    In the middle of January 1886, Nietzsche drafted a letter to that exceptional publisher, Credner. Explaining first that it was not possible to work out an agreement with Schmeitzner for a new edition of Things Human All Too Human, he suggested instead that Credner publish "something new that is finished except for the fair copy . . . the second volume of Daybreak." Instead of a second edition of Things Human All Too Human, a second volume of Daybreak, chapters 6–10: Daybreak he wanted to keep and expand, Things Human All Too Human he wanted to destroy and replace. This new intention lasted through March 25 when he told Overbeck in a letter, "Hard at work. In any case, have no concern, there will be no second volume of Daybreak. Two days later he drafted a letter to Credner informing him that the impossibility of publishing the new book as the 2nd part or the new extension revealed itself. It will get a title of its own (as it has a color and sense of its own)."¹¹ He did not report the title in this draft, but in a long letter to Köselitz on the same day he drew a rectangular box to enclose the words of his newly minted title:

    Jenseits von Gut und Böse.

    Vorspiel

    einer Philosophie der Zukunft

    The book prepared in the past year as a new introductory book to replace Things Human All Too Human was now Beyond Good and Evil. Its subtitle, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, shows that it remained the new introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

    What was it about Things Human All Too Human that led Nietzsche to think it deserved destruction whereas Daybreak did not? No reason was necessary for an intention he never made public, and he gives no reason for what he decided to do instead of destroying Things Human All Too Human: write a Foreword for it. He begins that Foreword by stating the key fact about his early writings: one may be able to discern behind all of them a corrosive suspicion and an "unconditional difference of perspective." Discerning that, one may also discern a search for shelter in which to protect himself against his own radical difference (HH Foreword 1); he closed his eyes, for instance, to the deficiencies of Schopenhauer and to those of Wagner, whose views he advocated in his first five books. As for Things Human All Too Human, he sheltered himself there too but by "inventing ‘free minds’" (ibid., 2), acting as if they had existed though they had not. That’s all he says in an explicitly autobiographical way in his first Foreword, going on from there to trace the trajectory a mind must follow to genuinely free itself, a trajectory that makes Things Human All Too Human a mere beginning, an erring beginning as he leaves his reader to discern. He does not say in this first autobiographical Foreword what he will say in his Foreword to part 2 of Things Human All Too Human, that his reason for wanting to destroy it was that it hid his corrosive suspicion and his difference of perspective behind something alien, even opposite, to him, the optimism of the modern Enlightenment.

    Unable to destroy and replace Things Human All Too Human, Nietzsche wrote his Foreword to it in April 1886¹² and turned his full attention to the last stages of preparing Beyond Good and Evil for publication. Then, on August 5, the day after he received its first copies from the printer, he got a telegram from the publisher he had turned to with the hope that he would buy back the remaining copies of his books from Schmeitzner: Finally in possession!¹³ That good news led Nietzsche to take up in earnest what he had by then decided would be his next major project, the project he worked on to the end of the year: reread his previous books and write Forewords to all of them, autobiographical Forewords that would show how they collectively inscribed a coherent trajectory in his becoming what he was.

    The Fall 1886 Forewords Project: Nietzsche’s Expanded Autobiographical Turn

    At the start of his Forewords project Nietzsche wrote a series of letters to his new publisher, Ernst Fritzsch (who had already published his first three books). In those letters he took pains to explain to Fritzsch—who had just made a serious financial investment in his future—the unity of purpose binding his books into a single work of high importance for the European future. The letters begin just after Nietzsche received Fritzsch’s August 5 telegram: he replied on August 7 with a letter that glows with the full flush of rekindled hope for writings Fritzsch had rescued from the corner in which Schmeitzner had buried them. Fritzsch clearly believed in Nietzsche’s future, and Nietzsche’s gratitude for his investment in it is evident as he describes his plan for his whole authorship to the publisher who now owned 9,723 copies of unsold books by one author. Regretting that he was not able to discuss in person what he wanted to do with the books, he set out in an uncharacteristically long letter what he planned and why. He had been set to thinking by the large number of unsold copies of each book: "it would seem to have to do with a whole new edition" whose new title pages could all say:

    New Edition

    Expanded by a Foreword (or Introduction?)

    He explains that there’s good reason that Things Human All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science lack Forewords: as these works were coming to be I imposed on myself a strict silence—I still stood too close, still too ‘inside’ them and hardly knew what was happening to me. Now he knows and is therefore the one who can best and most exactly see what is singular and incomparable in these works . . . the prelude to a moral self-education and culture that the Germans till then had lacked. Knowing now just where those works led and where he now stands in relation to them, I would like to turn to such retrospective and belated Forewords.

    My writings represent a continuous development that is not only my personal experience and fate—I’m the first of an upcoming generation that will understand from out of themselves what I’ve experienced and will have a discriminating palate for my books. The Forewords can make clear the necessity in the passage of such a development.

    Nietzsche’s personal way out of the cultural impasse of late modernity is the way out, the way out dictated by the problems themselves. And his way out was a continuous development: its stages follow one another with a necessity intrinsic to the problems. Writing to a businessman, he points out the practical advantage of the unity of his books in their development: "one who has bitten into one of my books will have to take up all of them"—buy all of them. He will spend the next winter thinking through his Forewords project, he says, and my endeavor will be to give each of these Forewords such independent worth that for its sake alone the works must be read. Singling out Things Human All Too Human by speaking of it first, he asks Fritzsch if the remaining 511 copies are enough to represent a new edition. A little over a week later (August 16), he sent Fritzsch a copy of the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human that he had written in April, describing it as a piece of psychology interesting enough in itself to give the book wings. More importantly he says of the book he long intended to destroy that it is an essential contribution to the understanding of my books and to the hard-to-understand self-development that lies at their foundation. The book is his most easily understandable and preparatory book, and, as he says in a second letter to Fritzsch that day, it is "a good and easily approached gateway to my own circle of thoughts and should be reissued right away with its new Foreword. It is no contradiction for him to say of the book he wanted to destroy that it is an essential contribution": now he has a new way of introducing Thus Spoke Zarathustra—not only through a book replacing Things Human All Too Human but also through autobiographical Forewords that show that all his books, in the unity of their organic development, introduce Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

    Exhilarated by the promise of a new future for his writings, Nietzsche looked to his beginnings and wrote his next Foreword, his elaborate Attempt at a Self-Criticism for the now impossible Birth of Tragedy. He identified its erring with a precision that he had judged unnecessary in the Foreword he had written to Things Human All Too Human—there he had set out the whole process of freeing the mind that lay in the future of Things Human All Too Human while leaving to its reader the task of recognizing that that book stood as the erring beginning of the process. His Foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, written in Sils Maria in August, was the only Foreword he did not date and place or call a Vorrede, possibly because the degree of this book’s divergence from what he actually became was so great that it required An Attempt at Self-Criticism as a supplement. When he completed it he sent it to Fritzsch with a letter that again highlighted the importance of his Forewords project (August 29)—All signs suggest that in the next years my books will occupy many—and he described unabashedly who he thinks he is: I am, if I may say so, by far the most independent and, in the grand style, the most thinking of thinkers in this age. Of course he may say so; his wide reading confirmed its truth for him, and he is speaking to the publisher who invested in his future. He continued with what it meant to be that singular thinker:

    I will become necessary, one will have to make every attempt to learn who I am, to understand me, to make me clear. Nothing is more useful to prevent the grossest misconceptions. They point to the way I’ve taken, and said in earnest, if I myself don’t give a few hints as to how one should understand me, the greatest stupidities will undoubtedly happen

    —and happened, and still happen, despite the effort he made to say who he was.

    Recognizing that he can’t judge the commercial advisability of reissuing all the past books of an author at the same time, he can judge exactly why it is advisable for the books themselves: because of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And he allows himself to say to his publisher what is true of that book even if it’s shameless to say so: it is "an event without precedent in literature and philosophy and poetry and morality and so on and so on. Believe me, happy owner of this Wundertier!" For the sake of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche wanted to destroy Things Human All Too Human and write a new introductory book for it; now, for the sake of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he wants to reissue all his books with new Forewords: to understand it "all my earlier writings have to be understood in the most serious and profound way, as must the necessity and sequential character of these writings and the development articulated in them. The two Forewords he has already sent reveal a true Aufklärung of me—a telling word choice for a thinker who had, in his first five books, cast his lot with the counter-Enlightenment, and who then, in the book for which he had written his first Foreword, cast his lot with the Enlightenment. Saying that his Forewords collectively are the best preparation for my bold son Zarathustra, he set out his plans for the Forewords he expected to write that winter. By spring, my whole literature, as far as it’s in your hands, will be ‘winged’ for new flight. For these ‘Forewords’ are meant to be wings!" He added parenthetically that he would not write separate Forewords for the four Untimely Meditations but had instead given a brief but necessary review of each in the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, Volume II that he had just sent—these four forewords, despite their brevity, are of great importance in situating Schopenhauer as Educator and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in Nietzsche’s development. Full of thoughts, Nietzsche adds an addendum that attests to the unity of the Forewords: he had been thinking of a separate little book of mere Forewords but rejected that as a sin against taste; still, taste would permit, even demand, a particular feature in a Foreword: "One can bear the horrible little word ‘I’ only under the condition that it’s lacking in the book that follows: it’s in the right only in the Foreword."¹⁴

    Nietzsche’s single-minded concern for the effect of his books is shown in his decision to destroy four years of intense labor with their innumerable great moments for the sake of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its fabulous tale of the coming to be of the thinker and teacher—the Zarathustra!—of our time. Now, with their new Forewords, his whole series of books could show the actual coming to be of that actual thinker. Nietzsche knew that everyone would read his books as everyone in fact did. And what mattered after he achieved his mature view was that his readers be supplied with the route in to his mature thinking. Let Thus Spoke Zarathustra show the full achievement. Let the Forewords show how its author fit himself to write it, how he became that singularity.

    Nietzsche’s decision to write Forewords to all his books gave him an opportunity to state the reason behind his decision to destroy Things Human All Too Human without ever having to make that thwarted decision public. Having combined Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow into a second volume of Things Human All Too Human, he explained in its Foreword the perspective he had adopted in both volumes. He wrote them during a period of extended and intense sickness, he says, years of acute physical suffering that naturally made the sufferer a pessimist about life—and for that reason he could not speak as a pessimist: "a sufferer has no right to pessimism. Therefore, in these books a sufferer and self-denier speaks as though he were not a sufferer and self-denier; the books practice the art of appearing cheerful, objective, inquisitive, above all, healthy and malicious. His report builds to a single word naming the only perspective on life to which his sickness gave him a right, optimism." But optimism is contrary to the pessimism that was his deepest tendency from the start. The book he wanted to destroy was written from a perspective not his own, alien modern Enlightenment optimism. That optimism is the modern version of what he identified in his first book as Socrates’ true crime: the belief that he, through reason, could correct existence, a belief founded on the passion that existence needed correction. Optimism in Nietzsche’s sense includes the view that we can correct existence to suit ourselves; pessimism is the view that that correction is not at our disposal, and it comes in two kinds, romantic pessimism that dreams of a magic correction not based on reason, and the pessimism Nietzsche eventually gained, Dionysian pessimism, the pessimism of strength that embraces existence as it is. The reason Nietzsche wanted to destroy Things Human All Too Human is founded on the core of his thought, on his fundamental disposition toward existence as such. Things Human All Too Human must therefore be read as his two Forewords to it direct: as an optimistic mask on his always fundamental pessimism, a mask he adopted in flight from a romantic pessimism and in the midst of profound physical suffering. That erring beginning to a freeing of the mind became expendable when, thanks partly to his burrowing into the underground of the human soul in Daybreak and The Gay Science, his always primary drive to inquire led to his discovery of the genuine ground of existence and the means to its affirmation, and he set them out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.¹⁵

    Completing his Forewords project some eight months after writing the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, Nietzsche asked in the last of them, on our behalf, What can it matter to us that Mr. Nietzsche is healthy again? (GS Foreword 2). His Forewords as a whole show why it matters: his becoming healthy through writing his books is his becoming a philosopher in the full sense, the philosopher of our time. Nietzsche’s task of self-display, beginning with one Foreword and later continuing through all the Forewords and the 1888 Ecce Homo, began at the point at which it became necessary: after he completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the first full work of his maturity. His last Foreword ends his Forewords project on a homecoming: Mr. Nietzsche’s becoming healthy again is his becoming what he is. With his Forewords Nietzsche’s task of showing what a philosopher is to an age skeptical of the very possibility of philosophy became a display of his own becoming in his books. An essentially private man who treasured the ways of a hermit had to violate his privacy in the service of philosophy—while politely keeping a chair propped against the door to the privacy that did not concern his masks, the merely personal (GS 365). The young thinker who had said that it is important to find out from people like Heraclitus that they once existed came to recognize that it was important that his reader find out that he existed.

    *

    Given the importance Nietzsche assigned to his Forewords as guides to the continuity in his thinking, it is proper now to enter his books only through the Forewords he supplied. In the chapters that follow I treat each of the books that I consider in a dual way. First I look to the Foreword he wrote in 1886 that places the book in the full trajectory of his writings, using as well his comments on each book from his 1888 autobiographical Ecce Homo. Then guided by the Foreword and by my own primary question of what a philosopher is, I turn to the book itself. Where it is relevant I add a source that gives direct access to Nietzsche’s developing view of what a philosopher is, a source he did not know would ever be available to his readers: the voluminous workbooks in which he wrote drafts of what he intended to publish in his next book. In crucial cases the workbooks are a revelation, enhancing what he published by confirming what he indicated in his artfully crafted books.¹⁶

    My book therefore contains an argument spread across the whole span of its exegetical treatment of the books selected: Nietzsche’s thinking from the beginning developed toward a natural conclusion that he understood and articulated only at the end: the philosopher as the exemplar of the highest human activity, thinking, can attain insight into the fundamental character of beings, of being as such, an always only inferential insight that is nevertheless rationally defensible and that he invites his reader to test. That insight grounds a second feature of Nietzsche’s thinking present at the beginning and fulfilled by the course of his thinking, the philosopher’s capacity to make, an artist’s capacity to fashion a way of living out of a way of understanding. The argument of my book is that the course of Nietzsche’s becoming led to insight into the fundamental fact and the highest value.

    That argument dictates the selective character of my book. I treat in detail only those books that best show Nietzsche’s development as a philosopher and an artist: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Things Human All Too Human, Volume I, and, for the ultimate gains of his becoming, the book in which he first intimated the discovery of the key thoughts of his maturity, the fourth and final Book of the 1882 Gay Science, "Sanctus Januarius. I treat even those select books selectively, concentrating on the parts that are particularly illuminating for my argument. I end with Sanctus Januarius not because Nietzsche’s philosophic development ended there—he continued to deepen and enrich his perspective as long as he kept publishing—but because the trajectory of his thinking naturally culminates in two matters reported first in Sanctus Januarius, that sacred January of a Book that looks back over an old year and out to the new year ushered in by his thinking. The first of those two matters is an ontological inference of a shared character in all beings that he will come to call will to power; the second is a consequence of that inference that could only have come after it as a human response to the ontology, a judgment of value that belongs to art," a human making that says to the totality of beings so understood: return, eternally return just as you are.

    It belongs to the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche—that theme of all my books—to make clear Nietzsche’s own place in that history. With this book on how Nietzsche became Nietzsche, I aim to show how he gradually grew into his understanding of that history and of his own place in it. His understanding begins in poetry, particularly in the Greek fable of Prometheus and in Greek tragedy as a culture-forming communal event; it grows through his intense study of the history of Greek philosophy through Plato that gave him his models for what a philosopher is as a thinker and actor immersed in a culture. The history of Nietzsche’s own self-understanding is displayed in the sequence of books he wrote as he passed through two long periods of deferring, of believing that the true bearers of culture are those whose advocate he was willing to be—Schopenhauer and Wagner first, then the thinkers of the modern Enlightenment. The end of his deferring is marked by a sequence of insights that build on his whole history as an investigator and grant him the perspective that is his mature understanding. With those gains Nietzsche became who he was, the philosopher of late modern times whose thinking and acting could be as decisive for our future as Plato’s was for our past. It is the coming to be of that philosopher that this installment in the new Nietzschean history of philosophy aims to chart.¹⁷

    * 1 *

    Young Nietzsche in the Service of Schopenhauer and Wagner

    Nietzsche as a young philology professor in Basel wrote five books in the service of a thinker and of an artist he wanted to believe were greater than himself, Schopenhauer and Wagner. Advancing them, he believed, would advance German culture and Western culture as a whole, both of which he judged to be threatened by a modern spiritual and intellectual malaise. The first of these books, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, set out Nietzsche’s view of philosophy and art in the great events of the success and failure of Attic tragedy in the tragic age of the Greeks. In Attic tragedy, the aspiration and achievement of human thinking and making reached a peak pictured mythically in Prometheus: the deepest wisdom led to the most ambitious founding, the wise founding of a people, the people that Attic tragedy could have made out of the Athenians had it not failed fortuitously at its height. That first book was followed by four Untimely Meditations, untimely because they opposed modern times on behalf of a future framed by Schopenhauer and Wagner. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche laid out what a Philosopher is, in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth what an Artist is. The four Untimely Meditations were to be the first of thirteen that would in their completeness demonstrate the necessity of overthrowing modernity and establishing the new philosophy and art. But Nietzsche brought his thirteen-book project to an abrupt end shortly after publishing the Wagner book in July 1876. That end meant in part a turn toward himself, toward the perspective he had been developing privately in workbooks and had kept secret, as he later said, for good reason: he judged that publishing such views would endanger the social order he advocated, not enhance it.

    Chapter 1

    The Birth of Tragedy: Prometheus the Knowing Maker of Culture

    I completely ruined the stupendous Greek problem . . . by mixing it up with the most modern things.

    BT Attempt at a Self-Criticism 6

    A False Start on the Right Problem

    The first and remarkable sentences of Nietzsche’s 1886 foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, An Attempt at Self-Criticism, display his assurance of the scope and nature of his work: he knew his thinking to be a European event of the first magnitude. Even this now impossible book had been grounded in a question of the first rank, as evidenced by the Europe-changing events in whose midst he places it. While the thunder of the battle of Wörth rolled across Europe, the first major defeat of the French by the Prussian-Bavarian army on the sixth of August, 1870, the author was sitting in some corner of the Alps, in the Hotel Alpenclub in the Maderanertal, "writing down his thoughts about the Greeks, his Dionysian World View," an essay partially taken up into The Birth of Tragedy. A few weeks later he was under the walls of Metz where the siege of August 19 through October 27 marked the decisive turning point in Germany’s favor; while performing the debilitating labor of a medical orderly he was still obsessed with the question marks he had placed over the alleged ‘cheerfulness’ of the Greeks. Finally, in that extremely tense month when peace was being discussed in Versailles from January 27 to February 26, 1871, he made peace with himself and, while recovering from the diphtheria and dysentery which had brought him back from the field, reached a settled and definitive view about the Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. The Birth of Tragedy, like the Franco-Prussian War, is a turning point in European history; each shifted the European center of gravity from France to Germany and, with this book, to a young German thinker preoccupied with thoughts of the Greeks.¹ This bravado, justified for us by how things turned out, is justified for Nietzsche by his book’s understanding of the role of philosophy in history: Socrates, his book argues, was the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history (BT 15). Beginning with his first book, Nietzsche stands to German history in its becoming European history as Athenian Socrates stood to the so-called world history his thinking initiated.

    The first paragraph of Nietzsche’s 1886 foreword ends by defining the profound cultural question with which his book inadequately wrestled: "The finest, most beautiful, most envied race of humans ever known, the people who made life seem most seductive, the Greeks—what? even they of all people needed tragedy? More even—art? To what end—Greek art? The second paragraph divides that question about art and the value of existence into its three main features as articulated in his book—key aspects of Nietzsche’s lifework. First: is pessimism as expressed in Greek tragedy necessarily a sign of cultural decay, or is there a pessimism of strength that springs from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence? Second: what is the meaning of the immense phenomenon of the Dionysian, that fundamental human experience out of which Greek tragedy sprang? Third: what is the meaning of the things that gave rise to the death of tragedy, of Socrates as a cultural event, or what is the meaning of science itself, our science—what indeed is the meaning of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? Driven to understand the spiritual situation of his age, Nietzsche from the beginning measured his present by the paradigm cultural events of the paradigm culture from which it sprang. And the features that mattered most were science and art, more narrowly Socrates and tragedy, more broadly truth and culture. As Nietzsche saw it in his first book, the problem of Socrates is the problem of the demise of the greatest of all cultures through an optimism about truth. The problem of Socrates is the problem of science itself (2), now also part of the urgent modern problem. How does science stand to healthy cultural life? Science arose first in colony cities of Greece and flourished in the healthiest cultural life ever, Athens in its age of tragedy; but, Nietzsche judged in 1871, science in the person of Socrates refused the Athenian celebration of tragic life and embraced mere optimism and good cheer at the promise knowledge offered. Fifteen years later, however, Nietzsche judged that his book, which for the first time, grasped science as something problematic and questionable, is an impossible book . . . A first book in every bad sense of the word despite its old man’s problem, the problem of truth and culture. Now he views his book with eyes that are older and a hundred times more spoiled, but by no means colder. With the same flaming intensity addressing the same issue, he can redefine the task: to look at science through the optic of the artist, but the artist through that of life. He does not say so here, but the optic of life he had ascertained from Life herself in the poetry of The Dance Song" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra written three years earlier in 1883, Life who there suggests to Zarathustra that she is not unfathomable. If that’s the case, the artist in his highest task as the maker of culture can be looked at through the optic of life fathomed, and science can be looked at through the optic of the artist fathomed. In the compressed formula of the new foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that the problems his book raised about science and art—truth and culture—and inadequately answered he can now answer more adequately on the basis of what he discovered in the interim.

    Nietzsche is merciless in setting out the faults of his book (2 and 3), and he is instructive in summarizing just how he treated the problem of the Dionysian (4 and 5). But it is when he restates the task I was already daring to undertake with this book (6) that he shows exactly what this first book aimed to initiate—and failed to initiate. He now very much regrets that he did not devise his own language for what was positive in his book but instead cast in the language of Kant and Schopenhauer things which fundamentally ran counter to both the spirit and taste of Kant and Schopenhauer. But there is something much worse about the book that I regret even more than having obscured and ruined Dionysian intimations with Schopenhauerian formulas. Worse even than ruining the way Dionysos spoke to me—and he an initiate and disciple of that god (4)? Much worse: "I completely ruined the stupendous Greek problem that opened itself for me by mixing it up with the most modern things" (6). The stupendous Greek problem is the problem of truth and culture—truth as lived and celebrated in Athenian culture, in Attic tragedy, but driven from the Greek stage and from Greek life by Socrates who corrupted Euripides and Plato. Much worse even than ruining the intimations of the god Nietzsche celebrated is ruining the problem of truth and culture. How did he ruin it? By mixing up that stupendous Greek problem with contemporary, merely local things, two things, the latest German music, Wagner’s, and fables about ‘the German character’ retailed by Wagner. Wagnerism was just a form of romanticism, the most unGreek of all possible forms of art. And the German spirit was abdicating any aspiration to rule Europe and instead pursuing mere politics in the service of mediocrity, democracy, and ‘modern ideas’—letting Europe in its modern enthusiasms rule the German spirit with its decaying, merely commercial ideals.

    Nietzsche

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